“Peace I Give, Peace I Leave: Making Peace in Times of Strife,” Week Five
Being raised by an attorney and a judge gets you an uncommon upbringing for sure, not the least of which is a network of acquaintances strongly devoted to perfecting justice. It was through this network that as a young man I became familiar with the work of a husband-and-wife acting and playwriting duo, Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, whose play, The Exonerated, is about six different real-life persons wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death. They wrote a book about the making of The Exonerated, entitled Living Justice, in which they took a break from writing the play to get married and go on their honeymoon to North Africa, and they share a particularly poignant anecdote from that experience, when they tried to share with their host in Morocco the topic of their embryonic play:
A man who had stopped us to paint traditional wedding henna on Jessica’s hands invited us to stay with his family for dinner. Honored by his generosity, we spent the afternoon playing with his kids, trading jokes in French, and eating couscous. After a while, he asked us what we did for a living; we were actors, we told him, but right now we were writing a play too. We did not have the French to fully explain the subject matter, so we just said the play was about justice. His ears pricked up: was this Allah’s justice, or man’s justice? Mans, we replied, Ah, he said. God’s justice was like an arrow: it went straight to the heart and always achieved its objective. Man’s justice, he said, was none of these things. It was misguided and jealous and often caused more problems than it solved. If we remembered the difference and strove for God’s justice, he said, our lives would be blessed.
Erik and Jessica’s Moroccan host had impressed on them a point that many people of faith may take for granted: that divine justice and human justice are manifestly different. He even went so far as to, like both Paul the Apostle and James the brother of Jesus, enumerate the destructive tendencies of human justice compared to the perfection of divine justice. I would take that one step further: divine justice differs so drastically from human justice because divine justice is intrinsically accompanied by divine peace, whereas human peace is neither deep nor long-lasting.
Last week, I paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote from Letter From Birmingham Jail, that true and positive peace entails the presence of justice. I believe the inverse is equally true: true and positive justice entails the presence of peace. If we are continually making war, what hope have we for justice?
When we speak of peacemaking, we speak of being at peace or in a state of peace, we do not speak merely of a lack of violence. As Baruch Spinoza puts it, “Peace is not an absence of war. It is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, and justice.” Peace is something that is proactive, not reactive. It must be created before it can be maintained. So before we can keep a peace, there must be a peace that has been made. Before we become peacekeepers, we must first be peacemakers. Which leads us to this sermon series.
There may be an absence of war for us in the United States at present—rightly or wrongly, we are out of both Afghanistan and Iraq—but I do not think any of us would describe the circumstances since March of 2020 as “peaceful” either. A pandemic means we live not only in a time of increased mortality and danger, but also of increased fallout from all the mental and emotional consequences of living during a pandemic. We are cruel to one another, tearing one another down and apart rather than building one another up and whole. We live in an absence of war, perhaps, but we also most certainly live in an absence of peace.
Yet we follow as our Lord and Savior a Messiah who is called, among other titles, the Prince of Peace. An entire week of Advent is devoted to the virtue of peace. We sing hymns to the peace that God is capable of through Christ. As Christians, making peace—and then keeping it—is part and parcel of our faith. We cannot separate peace from Christianity, they are completely intertwined. We began this series with two weeks on passages from the Gospel of Matthew on the nature of peacemakers and mediation respectively, and before hopping over to the book of Acts to hear from the parting soliloquy of Stephen the Martyr. Last week, we moved to another eventual martyr of the church—Paul—in one of the closing passages of his letter to the church in Rome, and today, to end the series, we arrive at a letter of yet another early martyr of the church: James, the brother of Jesus.
James was a contemporary of Paul, and both men were martyred at around the same time, James around 62 CE, and Paul in 64 CE. Their interpretations of embryonic Christianity, however, were quite different, and James is in many ways best understood as a response to Paul. Whereas Paul primarily concerns himself with the salvific impact of Jesus on the cross, James concerns himself in his letter almost exclusively with ethics and right action. For Paul, Jesus is a lutron, a ransom payment made to save us from sin and, by extension, from ourselves. For James, Jesus is the incarnation of divine morality. I am oversimplifying each man somewhat, but their fundamental differences are vital for illustrating the import of what I am about to say next.
Amid their differences of opinion and interpretation, James and Paul represent a united front on the topic of the fruits of the Spirit—that is Paul’s preferred term in his letter to the letter to the Galatians, while in this passage James terms such traits as wisdom from above. When we consider how the Holy Spirit is depicted across the New Testament, from John to Paul, as descending down to us and similarly ascending back to heaven, and Jesus describing being born again as being born anothen, from above, to Nicodemus in John 3, what Paul and James describe are one in the same: the traits we should exhibit if the Holy Spirit is active in our lives.
The simple question posed by both men would be: well, are those traits exhibited? And it is a simple question, yes, but a convicting one, because more often than not, our fully honest answer to that question is no.
Why? Consider this: how often have you heard it said to you, or to someone else, that life is not fair? And how many times have you said those exact words to someone else? The universality of this truism, that life is not fair, is rooted in how we have taken peace to mean the absence of violence, rather than as the presence of justice.
It is easy, perhaps too easy, to think of justice as purely punitive. Our criminal justice system exists to punish violators of the law, and divine justice exists to punish violators of the Word. But can we also not see that which is equally, if not more, true: that justice, for it to be true justice, must be inherently fair? Liam Neeson famously says in the first Batman movie that justice is balance, and there is a reason he was revealed as the antagonist in that film: justice entails balance, but it is not exclusively balance. Justice, for it to be lifegiving and life-affirming, must be fair in its balance.
Life is not fair, then, because life is not just. And we know this. We see good people harmed by evil, or happenstance, or by bad luck, and when we see people harmed by other people, very often the person inflicting the harm gets away without any accountability.
Peace is meant to countermand that universal phenomenon of harm done without comeuppance or accountability or reconciliation by addressing the source of the harm. Peace is, then, not just the absence of harm but the repair of harm that has already been done. Peace actively seeks to build a world in which there is less harm than there was the day before.
In this way, peace becomes, to use James words, the seeds of justice. Peace plants justice, peace begets justice, peace grows into justice.
Amid their differences of opinion and interpretation, James and Paul represent a united front on the topic of the fruits of the Spirit, or wisdom from above, depending on whose term you prefer. Peace is inspired by the Holy Spirit, plants the seeds of justice, and transforms us.
When we speak of spiritual transformation, do we speak of becoming new creations, or are we describing confirmation bias dressed up as Christianity? Do we dare let ourselves be transformed by the wisdom which comes from above, even if—especially if—it means surrendering our old sins, our old prejudices, our old selves? Do we dare bet on the possibility of a kingdom come, on the chance of a new Jerusalem, on the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, and that what was does not always have to be what will come next?
Wisdom from above has planted those seeds. Whether, when, and how they bear fruit…that is up to us.
By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
November 21, 2021